I feel, at times, like Stephen King's character Alfie, the frozen-food salesman who has decided to off himself in the middle of the bleak Nebraska winter but who can't actually perform the act because he's worried about his notebook full of collected graffiti--what on earth will his family think when they find it?--and so he delays, which, of course, saves his life, though King never gives us that nice, tidy ending we Americans love--well, some of folks do. I can and do live with plenty of unsolved stuff.
No, I'm not thinking of offing myself (I have too much work to do), but rather than collect graffiti in a spiral notebook and sit on the hotel bed reading it and alternatively putting a loaded pistol in my mouth, I choose to write my way out of darkness, or at least into the gray of a cloudy morning. So, here goes--a new poem (one of 3 already) for 2012.
So Much of Relationships is Unseen
So much of relationships is unseen:
The careful placement or concealment of words
articulated beforehand in the silent, mysterious,
compliant mind, calmly assuring a solution to
this two-piece, heart-shaped indelible puzzle;
The sweet, intense, then angry soliloquies
(What a piece of work is man!) we rehearse
until the words lose their meaning and time,
brought at last to its knees, collapses on itself;
The earnest hopes etched in silicone tablets,
imaginary, shifting ones and zeros that, though
they are arranged with mathematical precision,
forever do not total a sum worth knowing;
The pale, white light illuminating naked fantasies
whose gauzy existences depend on withholding
the shroud of reality--far too constricting a covering,
for fostering festering wayward, juvenile schemes;
The slow but sure erasure of what is and was
and could have been (the bigger loss)--once again:
So much data corrupted by invisible forces--
Real identity theft, right before our eyes.
But so much of relationships is unseen.
__________
Daylight, where the hell are you?
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